Professors as Public Intellectuals: A Reader [UPDATED]

Professors today have a growing number of tools available to educate the public, from online courses to blogs to social media. Yet academics have been slow to cast pearls through Twitter and Facebook. Likewise, it was TED Talks by nonscholars that made lectures fun to watch (but I owe a shout-out to the Teaching Company’s lectures, which have enlivened our family’s car rides).

I write this in sorrow, for I considered an academic career and deeply admire the wisdom found on university campuses. So, professors, don’t cloister yourselves like medieval monks — we need you!

While Kristof’s plea stumbles in many places (for example, left-leaning academics appear to be discounted out of hand, suggesting that society can somehow be changed only by academics who hold ideologies similar to that public), Daniel Willingham’s follow up presents a strong case as well, notably targeting the role of professors as public intellectuals in the education debate:

Kristof did not distinguish between faculty in Arts & Sciences and those in professional schools such as law, medicine, education, and engineering. These latter have practical application embedded in their mission and I think are therefore more vulnerable to his charges….

But again, I think Kristof’s blade is much sharper when applied to university schools that claim a mission which includes practical application. Schools of Ed., I’m looking at you.

The reason is that there are far fewer professors who don’t have to worry that what they say in public will cost them their jobs and that have the time to spend on non-teaching and non-research duties. At this time, 3 out of 4 university faculty are adjuncts or other contingent faculty. It is only those in tenured or tenure-track positions, with the far better pay, guarantees of due process and academic freedom, and personal time for outside activity who can take up the role of public intellectual….

This is the real reason for the decline in professors as public intellectuals: the destruction of their profession for the bottom line of others.

The closing point in this comment must not be ignored: The dismantling of academic tenure at university and K-12 levels includes a silencing of academics—something Kristof and Willingham appear to be lamenting.

Academics are often not well equipped to interact with a lay public, including being unfamiliar with the value and dynamics in the New Media as well as social media (Twitter, blogging platforms, Facebook).

Since I have made a conscious shift in how much energy I commit to traditional scholarly work versus public work, I have addressed these issues in a number of ways. Here, then, is a reader on the issues above as they relate to professors as public intellectuals:

Many people call for an end to politics in the classroom, as this is seen as the source of the problem. Rather than address systemic and structural oppression and discrimination, faculty are being asked to take “neutral” stances and just teach our disciplines, leaving politics to social media and in-person conversation. Yet for many scholars, this is our work. Many of us are trained to see and then speak on institutional and structural systems of oppression. I have been trained specifically to see and call out institutional racism through an intersectional lens. If we are being told to just do our job, then we are. So the real question becomes, is society ready to accept the true point of an education, which is to develop a group of critically thinking, conscious citizens? Is higher education ready and capable of taking on this work?

That is the true point of education, what James Baldwin meant when he said in 1963, “The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.” As educators, it is our job to teach students how to think critically so that they can engage with larger social issues. That is not confined to just the social sciences, but has an impact on all academic disciplines and departments. Yet as Baldwin also said, society is not always that anxious to have a mass of critically thinking and engaged people, because “what societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish.” That is why education matters more so now than ever as a location that should be unapologetically committed to developing students to become true critically engaged thinkers who learn how to apply those knowledges, methodologies and skills to locations outside spaces like this.

7 thoughts on “Professors as Public Intellectuals: A Reader [UPDATED]”

I am an adjunct professor and active blogger. Last year I wrote a letter to the editor to my local paper regarding an opinion piece authored by Eli Broad extolling the findings of the National Council for Teacher Quality report. I pointed out Mr. Broad’s obvious conflict of interest and the shoddy research done by NCTQ. The next day my Dean recieved an email from the PR department of the university asking her to get her adjuncts in line and fretting that my letter brought attention to an issue the university preferred to ignore. This is a good illustration of how the public voice of the intellectual could be squelched in the age of the adjunct.

Exactly so. Your case is a perfect example of what I was talking about. If you look around the net at professor/bloggers, you’ll find that most who don’t use a pseudonym and hide their identity are tenured and don’t have to fear retaliation (or, at least, serious retaliation) for what they post. When it comes to those less well protected, they usually choose anonymity. That certainly helps protect them, but it also allows their public role to be undermined by doubt and the limiting nature of keeping that anonymity. It’s a Catch-22 for adjuncts like yourself who would find the time for a public role regardless of the demands of your position (and an admirable thing that is, too) but must either expose themselves or undermine the very role they wish to take up.

BTW, thanks for including part of my comment from The Answer Sheet in your post, Paul, I’m very flattered that you thought it worth passing along. I’m a teacher in a large urban district who spent 10 years as a college adjunct before going back for my MEd, so I’ve been in the middle of this question for a long time. I still don’t have tenure in my district and use a pseudonym online to protect myself for this very reason. I could easily be “laid off” from my job if the powers-that-be in my district became annoyed with any public role I took up (and they likely would be) and even my union would not be able to stop them. I may well be a more public figure and post more openly once I’ve achieved tenure, but that’s still a couple of years off.